PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 21 March 2019

Fealty to symbolism is no way to save salmon

Fealty to symbolism is no way to save salmon

Chapter:

(p.98)
Chapter 15 Fealty to symbolism is no way to save salmon

Source:

Effective Conservation Science

Author(s):

Peter Kareiva

Valerie Carranza

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198808978.003.0015

This chapter tells the story of how the management options regarding Snake River chinook salmon became conflated with advocacy efforts to remove four major hydroelectric dams. As a result, conservation scientists lost sight of the larger, more complicated landscape of threats to these salmon. Simulation models that were meant to explore a wide variety of management options were so complex as to be impenetrable, and model outputs were never compared to real population data. Based on these flawed models, advocates for dam removal overstated the peril to salmon with a certainty that was unjustified (e.g., forecasting certain extinction by 2017 that never happened). This chapter argues that turning a complicated decision about hydropower, engineering solutions, hatcheries, harvest, habitat degradation, and salmon into a symbolic choice of “dams or fish” has hindered the discovery of portfolios of intervention and management that might actually solve the problem.

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 21 March 2019